Explore how the Civitas Learning Student Impact Platform can help academic advising teams remove barriers to registration by engaging with students in ways that better align with their needs.

4 Ways to Remove Barriers to Course Enrollment

Blog Closing Equity Gaps

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Today’s college students are very different from students of the past. While student populations vary drastically from institution to institution, today’s students are often older, more racially, ethnically, and socioeconomically diverse, and are navigating more complex individual circumstances alongside their education than previous generations.

This wide range of needs can lead first-time and returning students to struggle with navigating course registration processes and systems. Students may feel unclear about which courses they need to take or cannot create a schedule that accommodates their lives. Others can’t access the support and guidance they need because communication is limited to one channel or appointment windows don’t match their schedule. 

This uncertainty and difficulty navigating institutional systems and procedures can inadvertently create barriers to course registration, resulting in late registration or even failure to register that limits a student’s ability to persist or complete their degree program on time.

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With actionable analytics, case management, and communication tools, your academic advising team can remove barriers to registration by engaging with students in ways that better align with their needs.

4 Ways to Remove Barriers to Registration

1. Prioritize Engagement with Real-Time Visibility into Student Needs

Without the insights they need to identify genuinely at-risk students, we found across our partner institutions that their advisors often spend less than 30% of their time helping students who are less likely to achieve successful results. The Civitas Learning Student Impact Platform brings together a broad range of academic, behavioral, engagement, and financial student data to provide a complete picture of each student’s journey so advisors can prioritize engagement with those students who need it most.

Descriptive, diagnostic, predictive, and prescriptive analytics within the Student Impact Platform give advisors and administrators the insights to prioritize student engagement and the case management capabilities to execute their data-informed strategies at scale. Advisors can also quickly identify students who haven’t registered yet using filtering functionality to prioritize outreach, address any barriers to registration, and get students back on track.

2. Boost Student Appointment Attendance with Varied Meeting Modalities

Both traditional and non-traditional college students face numerous obligations to balance alongside completing their education. Busy schedules and competing commitments can make finding a time to meet or attending a meeting with an advisor difficult. Institutions can help their students balance life and learning by making it as easy as possible for them to access the guidance and support they need to be successful.

Civitas Learning’s case management capabilities make it easy to facilitate student meetings using a robust calendar integration that allows advisors to manage events, appointments, notifications, and reminders all in one place. The Student Impact Platform also enables advisors to offer a variety of appointment modalities to meet the preferences of their students. It helps students follow through on scheduled meetings with build-in notification and reminder functionality to help nudge busy students to attend important meetings with their advisor.

3. Improve Student Outreach with the Right Communication Channel

A recent Blackboard survey of 2,100 postsecondary students found that non-traditional students are more likely to prefer text messages than traditional students. Given that most of today’s college student population is considered “non-traditional,” institutions will need to adapt their communication strategies to include additional methods and channels to reach more students. 

By communicating with students in ways that are most convenient for them, student success teams can improve the effectiveness and efficiency of their communication efforts, ultimately making a more significant impact. The Civitas Learning Platform allows students to set their communication preferences, or advisors and administrators can implement multi-channel outreach strategies to test which mode of communication is most effective at reaching particular groups of students. 

Rather than sending mass messages to a predetermined cohort, use data to help you determine if a phone call, email, or text message is the most effective mode of communication for a particular student. For example, advisors can leverage insights surfaced in the Student Impact Platform to segment students and send nudges to students with a high likelihood of persistence but plan phone calls to students in need of more direct outreach. This data-activated, student-centered communication approach helps improve student response rates and enables advisors to personalize engagement at scale. 

4. Ease Enrollment with a Collaborative Planning & Registration Experience

To graduate on time, students need guidance and a clear plan to help them stay on track and enroll in the courses they need when they need them. Confusing registration systems or cumbersome paper and pencil planning can make it difficult for students to create a course schedule that fits their degree requirements, work schedule, family obligations, and social commitments. 

Streamlined planning, scheduling, and registration capabilities within the Student Impact Platform enable your institution to remove friction along the student journey, so your students know where they are going and how to get there. End-to-end planning, scheduling, and registration solutions provide accurate insights into course demand, enable advisors to collaborate with students throughout the academic planning process, and empower students to build schedules that support their complex lives and educational goals.

Create a More Inclusive Enrollment Experience

With Civitas Learning’s actionable analytics, case management, and communication tools, your institution can create a more inclusive enrollment experience for its diverse student population. When the registration process accommodates known and unknown needs, students can enroll in course schedules that support their priorities, preferences, and goals empowering them to complete their degrees on time.

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